


Burn Your Tongue

by obbel



Category: Latin American Celebrities RPF, Reggaetón Music RPF
Genre: Angst, Everyone Cheats On Everyone, Fanfiction is a healthy way to work through your feelings right, M/M, Reggaetón RPF - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-16 04:14:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29201172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/obbel/pseuds/obbel
Summary: This is a story about infidelity.
Relationships: J Balvin/Maluma
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Burn Your Tongue

It ends like this: someone talks to the press.

Juan looks at his phone as it rings, and he’s not going to answer it. He turns it over, face down, and thinks about drowning it in the bathtub as he watches it buzz. It makes its way towards the edge of the table. Before it falls, he snatches it up.

“I don’t have anything to say to you,” he says.

“So why did you answer?”

“Fuck off.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not.”

“I am.”

“When were you going to tell me?”

“Maybe never,” Jose says, and Juan feels the punch to his gut. He exhales, loudly, the wind knocked out of him.

“You were just going to let me find out from the internet?”

“Is that any better than hearing it from me? It doesn’t change anything.”

“You’re fucking unbelievable.”

“I’m sorry.”

—

It starts like this: Jose lies to Lulú. Jose lies to Valentina. Jose lies to Juan.

But really, it starts when Juan is drunk and high, and Jose is maybe drunk or maybe just pretending to be so he can sit too close and look too long and say too much. They were at some party, someone’s house, up on the second-floor terrace, Juan doesn’t remember the details. But he remembers the feeling of being trapped between the balcony and Jose, wondering which way to throw himself, which way would catch him if he fell.

He chose wrong.

Jose says, “come here,” and he goes, half-naked already, because they’ve locked themselves in someone else's bedroom, afforded themselves the kind of luxury that lends legitimacy to whatever it is they’re about to do. It’s not cheating if it happens on eight-hundred thread count sheets. It’s an affair, a rendez-vous.

_Une liaison amoureuse._

Juan stops finding French synonyms for Jose on top of him, pressing him into the mattress with his mouth on his neck.

He squirms out from underneath before Jose can leave a mark and rolls on top, straddling his hips. He pulls his shirt over his head. When he can see again, Jose is looking at him with his eyes lidded and his lips parted. He brings his hand up to cup the side of his face, and Juan thinks, _maybe._

Then his hand moves to his shoulder, pushing down on the bone.

Jose won’t ask with words, just keeps pushing on his shoulder insistently, incessantly. Juan almost wants to make him say it out loud, to hear whatever it is that he wants so badly. _Suck me, fuck me, tell me that you love me._

He doesn’t, though. He just goes down, and Jose keeps pushing. He keeps a hand on the back of his skull, and if Juan was sober, his eyes would probably be watering by now, which means his nose would be running, too.

But he’s not. Before Jose cornered him, he smoked two joints on the balcony and washed away the cottonmouth with something even stronger. The chemicals in his brain do strange things, or maybe it’s just Jose. He doesn’t usually feel this off-kilter.

Jose comes without warning, or maybe he’s not paying enough attention, far enough down his throat that he doesn’t taste anything. Juan sits back on his heels, watches as Jose collapses like a circus tent deflating, enormous, lifeless, smothering everything that gets in his way. He wonders if that’s it, then, if Jose will just roll over, put his pants back on, and walk out the door.

He does roll over, but he doesn’t leave. Juan moves up the bed, lies down next to him, their bodies on the same plane again. He leans in and kisses Jose on the mouth, just to see what he’ll do.

Jose kisses him back, which is a pleasant surprise. He kisses a lot, actually, with his eyes closed, so Juan closes his, too. 

He feels Jose’s hand on his waist, the stretch of skin between the bottom of his ribs and the top of his hip. Jose reaches lower, skimming over his thigh, although he startles when his hand brushes against Juan.

Juan opens his eyes again. Jose is looking at him.

“I don’t,” Jose starts, and Juan frowns. He lets the silence hang in between them until Jose clears his throat and starts again. “I don’t.”

Juan raises an eyebrow. “You don’t what?”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Make me come,” Juan says, and Jose flinches, but he nods, and then slowly, tentatively, he figures it out.

—

“Babe,” Natalia says. They’re lying next to each other in bed with their elbows propped up, both looking at their phones. “We should go to France.”

“Mmm,” Juan says, only partially registering her words.

“I’m serious! It would be nice.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are you listening to me?”

“You said we should go to France. But we’ve been to France.”

“We can go again.”

Juan makes another noncommittal noise, and Natalia rolls her eyes. Or at least, he’s pretty sure she does. He’s not looking at her. He hears her get up and walk towards the bathroom, hears the shower turn on, and he is still looking at the picture on his phone, helpfully suggested by an algorithm that apparently knows an alarming amount about him. 

The model — he lets his inner monologue refer to her as _the model_ even when he is overwhelmingly aware of her name, right there at the top followed by a little blue checkmark — is very thin, even by model standards. She has dark paint smeared artistically over parts of her body. In high-contrast black and white, she looks ready for war, despite the fact that she’s wearing a bathing suit, or maybe because of it. She poses in a strange position, sitting hunched over with her arms and legs sprawling out before her. If she stood up, she’d be nine feet tall.

Some of her hair falls into her face, but her eyes are still visible, staring at the camera with an intensity that unnerves him, the whites too white, the pupils too black. He can’t make eye contact, so his gaze drops lower to her stomach, unbelievably flat, and the tiny amount of waterproof fabric stretched over her hips and pelvis. There is so little of her, and yet he gets the feeling she could take him apart.

Natalia comes back from the shower and catches him like this, staring at the space between Valentina’s legs.

“Who’s that?” she asks. Her tone is light.

“No one,” Juan says, trying not to speak too quickly. “Explore page.”

“You’re lucky I’m not the jealous type.” She smiles affectionately at him.

He smiles back at her and sets his phone on the nightstand, face down. “You have nothing to worry about.”

“I know. I’m just teasing. I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

When he wakes up the next morning, he is alone. Natalia is already downstairs. He grabs his phone, hoping the photo will still be there. It’s not, some battery-saving mechanism having whisked it away into oblivion. He thinks about searching for her again, and maybe he would if Natalia didn’t yell from the kitchen to wake up, to come down because breakfast is ready, and she’s going to start eating if he doesn’t hurry up.

—

“When’s the last time you went to France?”

Jose is quiet. Juan stares up at the ceiling, waiting for a response. He can picture the look on Jose’s face, mouth half-open, eyes skeptical, a look that says _why are you asking me this, have you gotten confused, do you think I’m your ex-girlfriend?_

He doesn’t know why he asked. Maybe just to hurt his own feelings.

“Why are you asking me? You okay? Do you need to talk about...?”

Juan winces and pushes the phone farther away, slides it off the pillow and onto the mattress so he can’t hear the rest of the question.

“No, I don’t need to talk about that.”

Jose exhales. Juan moves the phone back closer to his ear.

“Are you okay?” Jose asks him again, and even if Juan was going to answer that, Jose talks over him. “Do you want to come over, or something?” he trails off, and Juan rolls his eyes.

“If I wanted to come over, I’d be there. You don’t want to talk?”

Jose doesn’t affirm or deny. He just goes quiet again, and Juan closes his eyes. He’s silent long enough that Juan thinks he might really have ended the call. But then he says, “with you.”

Juan opens his eyes again. “What?”

“That’s the last time I went to France. Paris Fashion Week. With you.”

_With you._

As if they’d spent more than a few hours alone together. In between shows, they’d snuck off to his hotel room, the one he’d picked and paid extra for because it had _a view._ But Jose drew the blackout curtains, double, triple checked for gaps. The room was so dark Juan thought he might get lost, swallowed up by the blackness. He reached out blindly for something to hold onto. All he found was Jose.

After he left, Juan went outside. Still shirtless, he leaned on the balcony and chain-smoked his way through half a pack of cigarettes. He would have stopped earlier, but the sun on his face felt good, and the city below him was too beautiful not to enjoy.

He wouldn’t describe it as a _with you_ trip.

“It was nice.”

He wouldn’t _not_ describe it as nice. But.

But his mouth starts forming a question without his permission, and “you wanna go again?” rolls off his tongue before he can register what he’s saying.

“With me,” he adds, just to dig himself in a little deeper.

“Uh.”

“You can say no. France isn’t really my country, clearly.”

“We could go to Hawaii.”

Juan laughs in spite of himself. “Fuck off.”

“Seriously.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

Jose starts humming, mumbled syllables getting more and more distinct until he very clearly enunciates _mis felicitaciones._

“Fuck off,” Juan says again, and then, “maybe I will come over, actually.”

“Who invited you?”

Juan hangs up the phone.

—

Jose in bed is a lot like Jose in real life.

He fucks like it’s a competition, like maybe he has something to gain from making Juan’s eyes roll back and his toes curl and his teeth bite the pillow.

Afterward, they lounge around, languid, mostly naked, talking about love for some ungodly reason. But they only discuss it in the abstract, divorced from reality, as if they were just two intellectuals, two students at the School of Athens, trying to figure out what keeps the world spinning.

Juan puts his finger on the globe, stops its revolution. He started the conversation, but now he regrets it immensely, post-orgasm high taking a nosedive listening to Jose try not to mention his girlfriend by name or by pronoun.

“What even is this?” Juan asks, interrupting him mid-pretentious-sentence.

Jose stops talking about _eros_ and _philia_ and looks him in the eye for the first time since he showed up semi-uninvited. “Do you want me to start over?”

“No,” Juan says. “I don’t care about the Greeks.”

“Didn’t you name your horse Hercules?”

“Shut up. You know what I mean.”

“So why—”

Juan cuts him off again. “What is this? What are we doing here?” He stops himself before he asks what he really wants to ask, _what_ are _we._

“You invited yourself over,” Jose points out. He sighs and scrubs a hand over his right eye, up over his eyebrow. He cradles the back of his head in his palm. He should look relaxed, but he just looks uncomfortable.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have.”

Jose shrugs, dropping his hands back down into his lap.

Juan exhales slowly through his nose, trying to calm himself down. Instead, it has the opposite effect, winding him up for a fight he didn’t know he wanted to pick. “What even is this? Your belated gay experiment? You never went to college so you’re doing it now? Heads up, it’s been two years. I’m pretty sure you like dick.”

“I went to college,” is all Jose says. “I dropped out.”

 _“Qué hijueputa,”_ Juan says, dumbfounded. “You should have stayed in school. Maybe you would have learned how to answer a question.”

Jose stands up and walks over to the side of the bed where the rest of his clothes still are, lying in a heap. He pulls his shirt over his head, ignoring all the questions, and Juan figures he should just quit while he’s behind. He follows Jose’s lead, and they get dressed in silence. 

Jose walks him out, a courtesy he wasn’t expecting. Maybe he's just making sure Juan actually leaves. But he lingers at the doorway, and Juan almost wants to apologize for crossing the line in the sand. He doesn't, though. He opens his mouth, and before he can say anything, Jose pulls him in to hug, tightly.

He says something into the collar of Juan’s jacket.

“What?”

_“Mia san mia.”_

Juan doesn’t have time to process before Jose pushes him out the door.

—

Bayern win the Champions League, and Juan gets outrageously, uproariously drunk. His house is full of people, invited over for an impromptu watching party. Global pandemic or not, he didn't want to be alone.

At fifty-nine minutes, Coman sinks it into the back of the net, and Juan is on his feet, yelling at full volume. He's not the only one. The room explodes, everyone jumping and yelling, pointing at the television, and pouring more drinks. Everyone except Chan, who sits sullenly on the sofa. His jersey and the matching face mask hanging off his ear are two tiny dots of blue, barely registering in the sea of red. He shakes his head and mutters "offside," even though it clearly wasn't.

Juan steals his beer and downs it in one go. Then he follows it with another, and another, and another, until he's lost count, and the final whistle blows, and maybe Bayern wasn't his team at the beginning of the year, but it's certainly his team now. PSG doesn't score, and when 0-1 flashes on the screen, Juan feels like he could die happy.

They watch the whole winners celebration, the hugging and the crying, players lined up to receive their medals. Neuer hoists the cup into the air, and there's a second explosion of sound. The television cuts to commentary, and Juan walks out of the living room and out onto the patio, smiling at the afternoon sky. He stays for a while, nursing another drink and letting his guests come up and congratulate him as if he had been playing, as if he had scored the winning goal.

His mind races with what-ifs, but he hears his own song playing from the speakers, and he feels pretty good about his choices. He finishes his drink and goes back inside.

The song changes. A woman's voice sings in German over a club-ready, pseudo-reggaetón baseline. Juan is just about to ask someone to change the music when a man starts rapping, first in German and then in English. It's unremarkable except for the phrase inserted in between verses.

_Mia san mia._

Juan freezes in his tracks. He stops Chan from finally leaving his gloomy little spot on the couch. "What is this?" he asks, gesturing widely and hoping Chan understands.

"The song?"

Juan nods, a little too deeply.

"It's the fucking Bayern song. Jesus. I thought this was your team."

"What does it mean?"

"I don't speak German."

"Yeah, but."

Kevin overhears their conversation. "It's the Bayern song. It's their motto," he says. "'We are what we are.'"

Juan stares at him blankly. He tries not to fall over. "Say that again."

"We are what we are."

Juan freezes, unsure of what to do with the muscles in his face.

Chan waves a hand in front of him. "You good, _parce?_ You look a little pale."

"I'm fine. Go get me another drink."

Chan grumbles about how he's not the hired help, but he does as he's told.

—

Jose calls him on Halloween. Juan sneaks off to answer like he used to when he was a teenager, up too late talking to his girlfriend on the family phone, voice barely louder than a whisper.

His voice is a little louder now, if only because Jose has nothing to say, really. He asks if Juan caught his performance, and Juan tells him the truth.

“No,” he says. “I didn’t.”

“Oh,” Jose says. “That’s okay. I wasn’t expecting you to watch a Fortnite concert.”

Juan doesn’t know what to say back. He laughs uncomfortably.

“Maybe we could play sometime,” Jose says, and Juan doesn’t know what to say to that, either.

He doesn’t get to linger on it long, though, because Susana knocks on his door. He knows it’s her. She always knocks first, two solid but polite taps on the door with her knuckles.

“I’ll be out in a minute,” Juan says to the door. To Jose, he says, “I have to go. I’ll call you later.”

“Okay,” Jose says. “Bye.”

He hangs up, and Juan opens the door. Susana smiles at him.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, just a phone call. Uh,” Juan pauses for a moment, just a moment, but the moment multiplies, becomes too many moments, all stitched together, weighing him down. He has to say something. Susana is waiting for him to speak. “You know Jose?” Juan bites down on the inside of his lip so as not to grimace as the words leave his mouth.

“Your trainer?”

“No,” Juan says. He can taste blood in his mouth. “Jose Balvin.”

“Oh,” Susana says, smiling. “Cool. He had a performance today, right? My nephew told me. He’s really into Fortnite.”

“Yeah,” Juan says. “That’s what he called about.”

“Cool,” Susana says again.

They make their way back to the group, claiming a spot on the floor on the living room. Juan grabs his favorite pillow, arranging it behind him as he makes himself comfortable. Susana sits next to him, leaning into his side a little. Juan puts his arm around her shoulder, pulling her in closer. She smiles at him.

Then he turns to Yudy, deep in the middle of a story. He tells her to start over, since they missed the beginning, and Yudy complains about how obnoxious he is. But after much eye rolling and sighing, she recaps, just for them.

Susana doesn’t stay the night. She has to work in the morning, and she leaves at one with the rest, kissing him goodbye. He kissed back, but not too deeply. His mouth hurts.

The next morning, he gets a message from her. It’s a picture of Jose from the night before, preforming while wearing a bright yellow suit, similar to one Juan owns.

 _I think he stole your look,_ the message says, followed by a smiley face. 

Juan stares at his phone and tries to think of a funny reply, but all he feels is sick. He doesn't message her back.

—

“Come over,” Jose says.

Juan, feeling petulant, says, “no, you.”

Jose laughs. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Juan says, not knowing at all if he means it. “Really.”

Jose laughs at him again.

“Let’s go riding,” Juan says, still not even sure why he’s making suggestions, and then he waits to see what Jose has to say to that.

“Horses, or motorcycles, or go karts?” Jose asks, and Juan almost thinks he won’t make a stupid joke. “Or you?”

Juan just rolls his eyes, even though he knows Jose can’t see. “You pick,” he says, and he hangs up.

Jose is better with the horses than Juan expected. Someone must have given him lessons at some point because he knows the basics, how to mount and dismount, hold reigns, ask for speed. They take two of Juan’s regular horses, even though Jose eyed Hercules with the same look he gives limited edition sneakers.

“Don't even think about it,” Juan had said, and Jose had put his hands up and backed away slowly.

They don’t go far, just enough that they can’t see the barn anymore. Juan slows his horse to a walk, and Jose follows suit.

“This is nice,” Jose says, because he can’t ever let a moment be. But it is nice, so Juan doesn’t say anything, just nods. “Now I kind of understand why you do this.”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe I should get one of my own.”

“No,” Juan says immediately. “You’re not cut out for it.”

Jose looks at him, almost offended. “You’re probably right.”

“Seriously, it’s not for everybody.”

“You think you’re special?”

Juan laughs, not sure if he’s joking, but before he can ask, Jose says, “you are, you know.” And before Juan can even blink, he nudged his horse into a gallop, yelling “race you!” over his shoulder as he speeds away.  
  


—  
  


It ends like this: 

“I’m sorry.”

“Enjoy fatherhood. I know that’s what you’ve always wanted.”

**Author's Note:**

> Written during a strange and scary time of [pregnancy rumors](https://twitter.com/0bbel/status/1331713348933705730) and Jose being an utter disgrace and embarrassment.


End file.
